Navigating Information

In 1934 Otlet and La Fontaine’s Mundaneum had over 15 million cards on thousands of topics. Otlet had also experimented with microfilm, photocells, televised documents and telex.

Navigating Information

Ever since the earliest hunter-gatherer asked a neighbor where to pick the best berries, humans have shared—and searched for—information.

Originally, people talked. You asked a question; you got an answer. But when people began storing information as writing, it was sometimes hard to find things.

One answer was to organize information by subject. Another was to create cross-references, like indexes and tables of contents.

As printed knowledge grew, tools for navigating it were critical for enabling the scientific revolution. Today the Web provides us an unprecedented knowledge navigation tool. What revolution will it enable?

Cross-references date nearly to the dawn of writing; some clay tablets referenced other tablets. Cross-references became a standard literary tool, from citations in Greek and Roman literature to the annotations of the Hebrew Talmud.

The decreasing cost of printing made large reference works like encyclopedias accessible to ordinary people. Centuries earlier, printers had added consistent page numbers to books, which made cross-references easier to follow.

By the late 19th century, inexpensive printing had produced what was then called the “information flood.” Card catalog systems organized knowledge by applying encyclopedia-like subject categories to entire libraries.

An analog computing pioneer, he helped lead the development of the atomic bomb. He realized the speed of machines could transform cross-referencing from a cumbersome extension of printed text into a revolutionary medium in itself, later called hypertext.

Microphotography offered both easy reproduction and space compression; this sample contains pages reduced about 25 times. The technique, nearly as old as photography, became commercially popular around 1900 as a “hot” new medium with many applications.